Ben Hammersley will Twitter across Turkey for the BBC

Ben Hammersley is going to spend two weeks using social media tools -- blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr etc -- to cover the run-up to the July general election in Turkey for the BBC. According to the UK's Press Gazette weekly paper:

"This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences," says Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News. "We talk a lot about convergence -- but we want to explore what that can really mean in international reporting."

The project is guided by the BBC's 15 web principles, which were published in February 2007 - the fifth of which states: "Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don't restrict your creativity to your own site."

The idea, says Sambrook, is to "reach new audiences in new ways. It will be the antithesis of rooftop 'dish-reporting'."

To declare an interest, Ben was a contributor to the Online (now Technology) section, implemented this blog inside the Guardian (we started it on Blogger), and has already done some multimedia reporting for The Guardian. His announcement is here.